


How the North Wind Howls

by Val_Ritz



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-10 00:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18927895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Ritz/pseuds/Val_Ritz
Summary: Something I worked up in my post-Hobbit fervor--which is to say, I didn't like the confrontation between Galadriel and the Necromancer, so I decided to purple it up a little bit.





	How the North Wind Howls

But Galadriel drew in a breath, and a great wind thundered down from the North. It scoured the broken flags of Dol Guldur, and the dark fortress groaned under a sudden chill that gnawed at even its mighty walls. The Wraiths, streaming in the gale, shrieked and were carried to the East, borne far afield, for there was something like to a star burning on the hand of the Lady of Lorien, and its cold hatred scourged them on like whips of iron.

And even so, Sauron laughed, his voice roaring into the wind in His Speech:

_“Behold the Ring of Air, adamant bright  
and see despair within its selfsame breath—_

_Thine arts are mine, elf-maid; twas I who wrought  
and in the doing, stole from thee thine wroth.”_

He raised a black hand of four fingers, and a wind from the South arose to match the Lady. The power rumbled, and the sky darkened with a fell shroud, a thunderhead of will that threatened to breach the vaults of the heavens themselves. Even the Wise were hard-pressed to keep their footing, and all about them cones of cloud reached greedily groundward—yet Galadriel smiled, and drew a second breath.

The image of Dol Guldur flickered and wavered before even the Eye, and Sauron beheld instead endless miles and mountains of deadly ice, crushed against itself with a fury belied by its glacial pace. Treacherous fissures gaped, their maws toothed with icicles. Here, in this place, the wind that she had called was at home. Sauron sucked in a breath, and he felt it gnawing at lungs he scarcely remembered. He turned his head, and the cold seared flesh he no longer had. Laid out before him on the ice was a crawling column of moving bodies. They trudged against the blistering white in coats of mail thickly rimed and often broken, their graceful limbs brought to agonizing slowness. In blued and blackened hands they clutched blades, golden and glorious, but stained a venous red that seemed to haughtily reject the cold--or the cold it.

He lifted his voice again, wavering against silent air:

_“Thine arrogance impresses even I!  
A witchling spins her life before my eyes_

_Great wickedness I practiced on thine kin,  
and still thou pester me with petty crimes.”_

But his hands shook despite the boldness of his words, and when he turned again he beheld Galadriel herself, mailed and armed. Her hair and eyes were bright with a light that had not yet dimmed with the time and trial of the many ages of the world. She regarded him, not with fierce hatred befitting an ancient foe, nor the tried wariness of an equal combatant, but with a glance he had felt only once—supreme indifference, towering and shattering apathy for his devices, his desires. In the cold and dark of the Helcaraxe, Sauron, Lord of the Earth, saw her face darken with the same certainty of nightfall—not malevolent here, but inexorable, with a power that could quail kings. She opened her mouth and released a plume of white into the air.

A dam opened within his mind, doors flung wide by even this gentle current. Limbs he did not own were speared by many-tongued serpents of cold. Eyes he did not know burned for rest. His mouth hung open, and he felt a whirlwind touch down upon the plain of his soul. Fury and outrage paled to desperation and fear before it, and alien ideas flooded his mind. Love and death, retribution and horror, the flickering candlelight of determination snuffed by agonizing pain. Towering above all else, the bars and bastions of regret closed about Sauron like the tightest prison of cold iron, burning the flesh of his thoughts as surely as the cold did his skin.

And it was in this chill, this lightest of breezes that schoolchildren share goosebumps by, that Sauron felt something else entirely. For though the air and darkness summoned by Galadriel could not breach the parapets of spirit built within him, somewhere in the deepest vaults there was a stirring of something long dead. A single note, plaintive and querulous, as if from a singer consigned to eternal sleep, struggling in his torpor to seek a tune long since forgotten and lost.

Thus, Sauron drew up his power about him and in his terror fled before the wind, far to the East, where great mountains stood between him and the winds of the North and West, and where great fires of the earth rose to warm his vestige until the returning of his Ring.


End file.
